ngx - youre dead right. What has happened is that the bot is getting to the "allowed registration" phase as its not been caught by the ip/email/username tests. At this point, its passing control back to vbulletin to process the captcha (etc). This looks like the bot has got the captcha wrong and has tried again and again and again before finally getting it right.

What I will look at is the location of the hooks Im using or a better description so that "allowed registration" only gets logged when vbulletin has done its tests or change it to read "passed vbstopforumspam tests, passing to vbulletin". The intervals being one second would point at it being a bot, not someone botching it. I guess I could look at adding code to the log (if vbulletin doesnt already, would have to check) botch captchas with the user input and what the text was, too see just how far off they are.

Sign up for an API key at stopforumspam.com and submit those spammers details.

Evaporate - thanks. Ive added gmail to my forums banned domain list. Had a couple of people complain but I dont care, they can use something else. Trust google? Hell no. You might want to block mailinator.com as well.

amazing hack, used the site for manual lookups but this is EXCELLENT, installed on www.escortrscosworth.com & http://anotherfordforum.com/, its already stopped a couple of spammers signing up last night. nominated for motm both sites are running it on vBulletin? Version 3.7.3 with no probs

I've installed this now on www.planetmgc.com and it seems to allow good ip address anyway.

Already seen a dramatic drop in spammer registrations. I've also blocked a couple of spammer bots that were chewing up CPU cycles including Yanga World Search bot (check it out on google). It's used by russians to spam harvest .

I've also just banned the entire Russian Federation IP range (find-ip-address.org) and entered this into .httaccees so that no Russian servers can even get to my site.

No one from Russia is likely to join my site to be honest anyway so it's a no brainer.

There are a couple of other tricks and hacks mentioned which I may use later on. But for now I'm a happy chap. Thanks Pedigree.

Going from 20-30 spam registrations per day, I've seen no new spam registrations yet.

I was getting a bunch of bot registrations all of sudden. I guess the bots finally found my forum site ( www.talkaboutissues.org ). I installed your hack and BAM I haven't had a bot registration for the last 2 to 3 days. This is a very nice and effective mod.

Check out my site and register if you like my forum concept. Thanks!!!

Installed this on Monday night at 10pm. By 2pm on Wednesday it had blocked 255 spammers.

Thanks so much for this mod, it's made moderating the registrations a much less time-consuming task.

I installed this mod on two of my forums and each time a spammer tries to register I get a database error. This is the case for both forums. The error is as follows:

Database error in vBulletin 3.7.3:

Invalid SQL:
SELECT DATEDIFF(NOW(), '2008-10-10 12:55:48') AS DAYS;;

MySQL Error : You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '(NOW(), '2008-10-10 12:55:48') AS DAYS' at line 1
Error Number : 1064
Request Date : Sunday, October 12th 2008 @ 01:46:10 PM
Error Date : Sunday, October 12th 2008 @ 01:46:13 PM
Script : http://www.webmastersden.net/register.php?do=addmember
Referrer : http://www.webmastersden.net/register.php?
IP Address : 92.241.169.185
Username : Violettaext
Classname : vB_Database
MySQL Version :

Anyone else get these error notices?
Anyone have any suggestions on how to resolve it?
I'm still using MySQL 4 on one forum and MySQL 5 on the other.

Thanks

Hmm, this is a strange now. I do all my development on 5 but I installed 4.1.22 and the query is indeed a valid one. Try this, open includes\functions_vbsfs.php, go to line 71 and change

$sql = "SELECT DATEDIFF(NOW(), '" . $lastseen . "') AS DAYS;";

to

$sql = "SELECT DATEDIFF(NOW(), '" . $lastseen . "') AS DAYS";

Notice the ; removed from before the last "

Can you PM me your exact version of mySQL, PHP and Apache that youre using on the forum that gives you this error, your server locale (US, Japan, French etc) so that I can look at it a bit more

I tried to register on your forum but your NoSpam questions/answers are wrong. 8+8-3 = 13 but not according to your forum :)

What would be good is a search feature like a cron job on initial install to just search trough already registered users and clean them out if there is any or log them for easy deletion

Dr Autonamus - something that Ive already thought about that I was going to include in 0.8. ive tried to avoid the feature spread for 0.7 but Ill give write that on my whiteboard now. This is would painfully slow unless using downloaded lists which would be very quick indeed.

Hi,

There was a typo in the answer setting which has been corrected.
The problem exists on both of my sites, the one using MySQL4 and the one using MySQL5.

The first site, (vbulletinstuff.com), is using MySQL 5.0.45 and PHP 5.2.6.
The server is located in Hong Kong.

The other site, (webmastersden.net) is using MySQL 4.0.27 and PHP 5.2.6.
The server for this site is located in the U.S.A. I can switch it to MySQL 5 but I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

I will change the code as you suggest and get back to you with the results.

Thanks.